From blurry pinholes to digital

Cameras have come a long way. Three of the four local artists’ exhibits that opened at Artspace and the Project Space Gallery in Plant Zero Friday night spanned the gamut of photographic possibilities.

Foggy black and white photos, blurry photo postcards and vibrant wavy photos, in addition to bright acrylic paintings made the walls pop at the Manchester-area gallery.

The large parking lot was packed, as a steady flow of people mingled in and out of the gallery. A DJ turned the tables down one hall, as a band played a Flaming Lips cover in the main gallery. Finger food was nibbled and wine was sipped.

The Project Space Gallery is a long hallway where VCU School of the Arts professor Rosemary Jesionowski’s interactive installation “Where are you going, where are you from?” hangs.

Jesionowski turned her color pinhole photos of landscapes and buildings into self-addressed, postage-paid postcards with questions on them like: “Where are you?” or “What’s something you did when you were 11?”

The postcards are hinged onto the gallery wall so viewers can see both sides. Most people have answered the questions literally, while others filled in random answers or wildly colored with crayon. Jesionowski says she sent out around 3,000 postcards.

“I am exploring ideas of travel, moving and memory as they relate to one’s sense of place or home,” Jesionowski said. “I began by giving postcards to friends and family . . . Once I had exhausted those resources, I began sending whole stacks of postcards to friends, magazines and art centers across the country, asking that the cards be handed out to as many people as possible.”

Douglas Barkey’s “Traversed Light” plays with the instant feedback of digital photography to create distortion and wavy squiggles of bright light. Barkey also used movement and digital tools to make his large, vividly colored photos.

“I am fascinated by the manner in which I can ‘paint’ as a photographer, literally using my camera to transform nature into a flowing river of light, a dancing and vibrant space, merging colors to form new shapes that only exist inside the camera,” Barkey said.

Originally from Argentina, Barkey now lives in Richmond where he is the vice president of Media WORKS Enterprise, an art and design youth development program.

Catherine “Kitty” Johnson’s “A Bridge Hidden by the Fog” also takes advantage of digital photography technology, to capture the fog and bridges on the James River.

Johnson says a digital camera sees fog differently than a traditional camera. Her black-and-white photos show the harsh lines of the bridge against the wispy, mysterious fog.

“I have been photographing the river and its bridges for years at different seasons and at different times of the day. Depending upon the light, the time of day, the season of the year; the same subject becomes an entirely different picture,” Johnson said.

2002 VCU painting and printmaking graduate Jessica Sims’ “Right Here, Right Now” is a collection of bright and simple acrylic paintings. The paintings are small, and their paint is thick and textured, giving them a sense of movement. Sims uses color associations from memories of childhood to create the abstract works.